Inside the complex anatomy of agency AI bills

The makeup of an agency’s AI bill is getting more complicated. Agency execs say AI costs are growing and metered model usage is becoming a trend, forcing execs to take a closer look at AI expenses and who foots the bill. 

If an exec were to get a regular bill for third-party AI tool costs, here’s what would be on it: subscriptions for the tools—like Claude, ChatGPT and Google’s suite of AI-powered offerings, tokens to use said tools and employee costs to pay staff who are using the tools.

For the most part, agencies are carving out a piece of their existing tech budgets to fuel AI spend rather than creating a new line item on the P&L. According to research from Ramp, about 31% of companies spend more than $10,000 per month on AI, indicating AI is a formal budget line. All three of the agency execs Digiday spoke with declined to outline specific AI spend figures. 

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Media Briefing: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit, Sept. ‘26 ‘Google Zero’ edition

This week’s Media Briefing recaps what publishers said about search traffic declines, opaque AI licensing contracts and monetizing AI visibility during closed-door town hall sessions at the Digiday Publishing Summit, held in Miami this week.

  • Overheard at DPS, “Google Zero” edition
  • OpenAI partners with a Canadian local news network, Amazon wants in on short-form video news and more.

Overheard at DPS, “Google Zero” edition

Publishers know the old playbook is breaking. Search traffic is shrinking, AI platforms are increasingly intermediating audiences and the mass-traffic, programmatic advertising model that powered much of the digital publishing ecosystem is losing steam. What’s far less clear is what comes next — or how publishers ensure they get paid fairly in the process.

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